Finchley - Cultural References

Cultural References

William Hogarth painted his satirical 'March of the Guards to Finchley' in 1750. It is a depiction of a fictional mustering of troops on the Tottenham Court Road to march north to Finchley to defend the capital from the second Jacobite rebellion of 1745.

A number of fictional characters have been associated with the area, including:

• In Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop Mr Garland, one of the principal characters, lives in "Abel Cottage, Finchley".
• Bluebottle, a character in the 1950s BBC radio series The Goon Show, hails from East Finchley, where Peter Sellers who played Bluebottle used to live at one time.
• In various episodes of the Channel 4 comedy Peep Show Finchley is used as an on-site shooting location.
• In the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Susan Pevensie says that she and her siblings, Peter, Edmund, and Lucy, are from Finchley, despite no mention of Finchley being made in C. S. Lewis's book - it is only mentioned that they are from London. In the next film, Prince Caspian, Edmund, on discovering in the ruins of Cair Paravel a gold Chess piece, says, "Well, I didn't exactly have a solid gold chess set in Finchley, did I?", saying that they are obviously in Narnia.
• The Monty Python's Flying Circus comedy sketch, The Funniest Joke in the World, is set in Finchley.